On the Celtics third possession of the game, Al Horford secured a Jaylen Brown miss, swung it to Jayson Tatum and then set a screen for him. He got the ball back, worked it to the opposite side back to Brown, who drove and kicked it back out to Tatum. With Pascal Siakam closing in, he swung it again to Horford, who quickly got it to Marcus Smart in the corner. Smart attacked that closeout, got back into the paint and got it back to Horford at the top ... just as the shot clock buzzer went off.
Never has a turnover looked so good.
Ime Udoka chastised his team after a brutal loss to the San Antonio Spurs for spending too much time in first quarters trying to find individual rhythms rather than play the right way. The message was clearly received.
That was especially clear in the game-sealing bucket.
Toronto had done what many teams have done against Boston. They were making one last push, cutting Boston’s 13 point lead down to nine. With 1:10 left in the game, there was still time for a miracle -- or a patented Boston collapse.
It was a very familiar scene. The Celtics had just turned the ball over and it turned into a full-court pass and dunk. The crowd was getting into it, and Boston needed one more basket to put this away.
Normally, Boston would go for a knockout punch -- some kind of Tatum side-step 3-pointer or Brown pull up early in the shot clock.
Instead, Smart got rid of the ball early as Toronto came to double, Brown drove and found Josh Richardson cutting along the baseline, who in turn got it back to Brown for a layup.
“We talked about it in the timeout,” Udoka said. “We said, ‘We’ve been here,’ a few times in this game with double-digit leads and throughout the season. This time let’s keep our foot on the gas and keep doing what got us here. We do have sets to go to guys but, at the same time, the team basketball, penetration and kick, ball movement was great tonight, so we wanted to stick with that, not just get stagnant and let them load up.”
This game was certainly not perfect and definitely not pretty at some points, but slowly, the Celtics are doing more of the things their coach has asked them to do. Their play has changed a lot just since the first game of the season. Even Tatum, who has fallen back into a weird shooting abyss, didn’t let his struggles derail him from following Udoka’s orders to spread the wealth.
It’s a gentle reminder that there is a process that needs to be, well, trusted.
“It’s not all going to happen all overnight or in the first couple weeks of the season,” Richardson said after the win over Toronto. “It’s a tough game and, don’t forget that you’re still playing against the best players in the world while trying to figure out a whole new system and a whole new defensive scheme and new teammates. It’s not easy.”
Basketball is, at its core, quite simple: two teams participate, time and score is kept, at the end there is a winner and a loser. Amass enough wins and one team becomes a champion.
This is what everybody wants. The question, though, is how does that team get there.
This is where it gets complicated. These 30 NBA teams are so full of talent that the process of scoring more points than the other team has grown increasingly difficult. The athletes are so good and so smart that the rudimentary basketball we all learned growing up doesn’t apply. The task of making baskets and preventing opponents from making theirs practically requires a Ph.D.
“Just imagine doing something for years,” Smart said. “Then you come into a job where you went to school to get a degree for this job, and then out of nowhere something you never studied for or had experience with, they come in and say what they want and it’s supposed to happen overnight. It’s not gonna happen. It’s gonna take time - you have to learn, you have to adjust. You have to find out how to do it in a quicker way to help you, and that’s what we’re doing.”
This is the hardest part about trying to figure out a team like the Celtics. The games are about wins and losses, and no one is happy when the losses happen. But at the same time, the process of building a true contender isn’t instantaneous.
No one can snap a finger and turn Tatum into LeBron James. Udoka wants Tatum to play a style that runs different to everything he has done as a professional. He wants Smart to run a defense that is unlike anything he’s run in the NBA. And he wants it all to happen while still basically needing to wear name tags around the Auerbach Center.
“Ime’s a different coach than what we were used to for those years,” Smart said. “He brings a different method, mentality to this team. We knew coming in it wasn’t going to be easy. We were going to have ups and downs, especially learning a new system and way to play, and getting re-familiarized with his coaching staff. We’ve been doing a great job. It’s not going to be easy. But the patience Ime has had with us just shows the growth and maturity this team has.”
Patience only goes so far for fans. The tickets aren’t any cheaper in November because it’s going to take some time for them to learn the new system. This is a results-based system and the results haven’t been there yet -- at least not consistently.
They see frustrated players very obviously deviating from the plan for stretches of the game, which in turn frustrates them. The paraphrasing of fan sentiment can be summed up as ‘If we’re being asked to be patient with the results, then at least stick to the plan and try the whole time.’
It’s a fair hit. Players bear the responsibility for making this work. It’s harder than anyone expected, but being frustrated by a recipe doesn’t mean shutting the stove off and serving the undercooked scraps. It means working through it, adjusting, and getting something fairly presentable together.
“The biggest help, honestly, is just being vocal,” Richardson said. “Because if you’re doing something completely different than you normally have been. ... If you communicate, if you’re all on the same page, then you’ll figure it out. But as long as we’ve got that continuity going forward, I think that’ll be good for us.”
The process of still learning and implementing Udoka’s new system is an explanation of why expectations need to be tempered, not an excuse for players to slack off. That’s why this game against the Raptors might actually be Boston’s most encouraging game of the season. They, for once, stuck to the plan the whole night and didn’t let misses or whistles distract them from their goal.
Any team can stick to the plan when the shots are falling. Any team can stick with it when things are going well. Against the Raptors, Boston stuck with it when they were turning it over, giving up offensive rebounds, or watching their shots go halfway down and then rim out. They played the right way, even when things weren’t going their way -- and they won.
We’re still going to have to be patient on the outside to see how this all works out. As long as those guys on the inside continue to make progress and actually work to do what the coach wants, there will be enough positive results to hold people over until there is a finished product.
